Merivale’s The Chicken Shop opens this week

Author: Sophie McComas
Photography: Courtesy Merivale

8:27AM, Jan 24, 2017

Ben Greeno's long-awaited side-hustle, The Chicken Shop, is
opening on Australia Day, right next to The Paddington.

Serving up rôtisserie meats, salads and sandwiches from a small
shopfront on Oxford Street, The Chicken Shop is the first straight
takeaway venture for Merivale and the fourth venue it has opened on
the same block in just over a year, joining The Paddington, Fred's and cocktail bar Charlie
Parker's.

Aside from the same French-style rôtisserie chicken found at The
Paddington and a selection of other proteins that'll change each
night (ocean trout, pork belly, lamb rump, glazed ham and beef rump
among them), it's the sandwich section that has chef Ben Greeno
particularly buzzing. "I've actually wanted to do a sandwich place
for a while," he says. He'll be using Brickfields bread to sandwich
fillings such as glazed leg ham with Comté cheese, Dijon mustard
and pickle, a hot chicken number with jalapeño and pickled carrot,
and (our favourite) fish fingers with soy beans and togarashi, a
riff on the fried-fish-with-mushy-peas days of Greeno's British
childhood. On the sauce front, there'll be yoghurt harissa, aïoli,
green chilli and a hot sauce with an exclamation mark after it.

The Chicken
Shop.

Side dishes are along more classic chook-shop lines - cos with
avocado, radish and pumpkin seeds, a chickpea salad with tomato,
cucumber and feta, some green beans, a potato gratin - but they
roll with the laid-back vibe that Greeno is aiming for. "Sometimes
you want nothing more than to grab some takeaway and have an easy
night," he says. Amen.